[Nate the Great]

CRUSHER: These are very sophisticated devices. With enough time, they will give you
WORF: Sixty percent of my mobility. No, I will not be seen lurching through corridors like some half-Klingon machine, the object of ridicule and disgust.

I doubt even Riker would let himself be seen as a shambling zombie. This whole idea was stupid.

CRUSHER: You're using the desperation of an injured man as an excuse to try a procedure that you couldn't do under normal circumstances. I checked with Starfleet Medical. They have turned down your request to test genetronics on humanoids three times already.
RUSSELL: Are you really going to hide behind the rules of some bureaucracy? Beverly, your patient's life is at stake here.

This is a place where it's good to challenge the crew's principles. Russell does have a point. She's not evil, she's just a bit misguided when it comes to medical ethics. And incidentally the triple refusal should've been part of Beverly's initial research.

RUSSELL: His injuries were so severe I don't think any conventional treatment could've saved him.
CRUSHER: The point is, you didn't even try standard treatments.

Beverly has a point here. Russell IS taking advantage of vulnerability to test her theories. At least try the standard treatment, or be prepared to explain why you didn't at least make the attempt.

RUSSELL: I make no excuses for my approach to medicine. I don't like losing a patient any more than you do. But I'm looking down a long road, Doctor. This man didn't die for nothing. The data that I gathered is invaluable. It will eventually help save thousands of lives.
CRUSHER: I doubt if that will be any comfort his family.

A good moral, and one we can't let the medical industry forget. You can't look down the "long road" of the theoretical if it lets you forget the immediate needs of the patient.

RUSSELL: Let me ask you this. If some years from now, borathium therapy were to save the life of someone you loved, would you still condemn me?
CRUSHER: I will not be drawn into a hypothetical argument, Doctor.

This issue will come up again with Crell Moset later. We can talk about it a bit more then, but for now let's move on.

PICARD: If he can't make a full recovery, Worf will to kill himself.
CRUSHER: Not in my Sickbay, he won't. I'll put him in a restraining field and post security around his door before I let him commit suicide.
PICARD: And how long will you keep him there? A week? A month? A year?
CRUSHER: If I have to. Suicide is not an option.

Doesn't stasis exist? Furthermore, this is another conflict of principles. Just because it would be unethical to imprison a patient for a year doesn't mean that it would be wrong to do it for a week if medical research is ongoing and yielding positive progress.

CRUSHER: Putting aside for a moment the fact that a paraplegic can live a very full life, there is also a conventional therapy that could restore much of his mobility.

Once again Beverly misses the point by insisting on a human perspective. Perhaps a HUMAN paraplegic can live a full life, but that doesn't necessarily apply to Klingon paraplegics.

CRUSHER: The first tenet of good medicine is never make the patient any worse. Right now, Worf is alive and functioning. If he goes into that operation, he could come out a corpse.

And again. If you lock Worf up in a cell to prevent him from committing suicide, his quality of life will be zero. And don't forget that Worf is more resourceful than most in creating weapons. Are you not going to allow him anything that could possibly be turned into a weapon? I can't think of anything you could safely give him.

RIKER: Remember Sandoval? Hit by a disruptor blast two years ago. She lived for about a week. Fang-lee? Marla Aster? Tasha Yar? How many men and women, how many friends have we watched die? I've lost count. Every one of them, every single one fought for life until the very end.

Sandoval is a Spanish name. She never appeared on screen. Neither did Fang-lee.

Marla Aster had no chance to fight for life, I don't see why Will even mentioned her in this context except for fanservice.

RIKER: You are my friend, and in spite of everything I've said, if it were my place, I would probably help you. But I've been studying Klingon ritual and Klingon law, and I've discovered that it's not my place to fill that role. According to tradition, that honour falls to a family member. Preferably the oldest son.

Why don't they at least mention Kurn here? Kurn would've gotten the job done by now. It also would've allowed Kurn to keep his family and position on the Council.

Then again, I could write a whole other screed about what would've happened in DS9 if Worf hadn't joined the crew.

RIKER: The son of a Klingon is a man the day he can first hold a blade. True?

Then what's the point of the Rite of Ascension?

WORF: If I die, he must be cared for.
TROI: I'll make sure he reaches your parents' home safely.
WORF: No. They are elderly. They cannot care for Alexander. Counsellor, I have a serious request to make of you. Would you consider?
TROI: You want me to raise Alexander?
WORF: I have come to have a great respect for you, Deanna. You have been most helpful in guiding me since Alexander's arrival. I can't imagine anyone who would be a better parent to my son. If it is too much to ask.
TROI: I'd be honoured.

This whole situation is weird. Even if Sergey and Helena are too old to handle a small boy at the moment, there's still Kurn and Nikolai. For that matter, Gowron owes Worf a favor at this point.

RUSSELL: Focus the drechtal beams on the anterior and posterior spinal roots.

Crell Moset would later use drectal beams in a novel. The symbolism does not escape me.

PICARD: Good. I understand from Mister La Forge there's a minor fluctuation in the starboard warp coil.

"The" starboard warp coil? There are eighteen in each nacelle! Seriously, where are the technical advisors this week? "One of the starboard warp coils"!

CRUSHER: Reading the initial sequences at ten to the ninth base pairs per second.

There are 3.2 billion base pairs in human DNA. Unless you're going to tell me that Klingon DNA is millions of times denser than human DNA the intial sequencing should be done before Beverly could even say it!

RUSSELL: The scanner is having trouble reading the Klingon dorsal root ganglia.

The dorsal root ganglia is between the spinal cord and the nerves going to the body. I think Russell is trying to send signals from the nerves into the spinal cord and is having trouble. This seems like something that could be resolved in simulations or by using cloned spinal tissue.

CRUSHER: All right, make a note in the log. Death occurred at twelve hundred forty hours.

Time to bring up faulty DS9 tricorders again. Death should be one of the first things you want sensors to be able to detect without making mistakes.

CRUSHER: I am delighted that Worf is going to recover. You gambled, he won. Not all of your patients are so lucky. You scare me, Doctor. You risk your patient's lives and justify it in the name of research. Genuine research takes time. Sometimes a lifetime of painstaking, detailed work in order to get any results. Not for you. You take short cuts, right through living tissue. You put your research ahead of your patient's lives, and as far as I'm concerned that's a violation of our most sacred trust.

A good moral.

Memory Alpha

* The container that fell on the stunt double was made out of styrofoam. Well, I jolly well hope so!
* It's brought up that Picard approved of ritual suicide when Odo and Sisko were so against it in "Sons of Mogh." Chalk it up to differences in Bajoran law.
* Kor will repeat "help me end my life as I have lived it" in "Once More Unto The Breach." I don't doubt that the expression is a common Klingon one.
* The creative staff wanted to make Crusher's and Russell's conflict more balanced. I say they failed. As Crusher makes clear, Russell plays games with people's lives as a shortcut and happens to get lucky sometimes.
* In one of the Enterprise-E novels Crusher and Russell meet again. Crusher points out that it was only Klingon redundancy that let Russell "succeed" and that genetronics had died in the decade since.

Nitpicker's Guide

* Phil wonders how Klingons can commit suicide so easily if they have so many redundancies. I have no doubt that Klingons have figured out exactly where to stab to get death by now.
* Why does the surgical team have their hair gathered under caps, but Worf doesn't?
* Phil also wonders about the hospital food thing.